On the Day I Died (9 page)

We raced into Toni’s bedroom. Heaving and panting, we shoved her Pink Princess vanity table across the door, then headed for the window.

It wouldn’t budge.

“Come on,” I groaned, beating on the sill, the frame, the glass.

We could hear the scrape and slither of the monsters in the hall.

“Davey? What do we do?” cried Toni.

There was no time for plans. The monsters had already reached the door and were pushing and grunting
against it. We could hear their teeth gnashing like saw blades and smell the sickening mixture of grape Popsicle and blood. One of the tentacles flattened and swept under the door. It slid between the vanity’s legs, groping.… It grabbed Toni’s Wetty Betty doll, seemed to examine it by touch, then released it. Its webbed hand bumped into my bare toe, and I jumped back. The movement excited the monster. It closed around Toni’s teddy bear. It squeezed. Stuffing exploded.

“Pookie!” yelped Toni.

A forked tail joined the tentacle in searching, grabbing, squeezing. Books and board games scattered, the
Sky King
bedside lamp bounced once and shattered, and in a sickening crunch the little man on top of Toni’s peewee bowling trophy was pounded into shards.

The tentacle reached for her Chrissie Dream Cottage.

“Not Chrissie!” Toni screamed. Snatching up a tennis racket, she forehanded the tentacle.
Thwack!

The tentacle grabbed the racket and squeezed. Wood and strings flew. And now the forked tail was back. It swept across the bed, knocking a package to the floor, seizing a pillow. Feathers filled the air.

Even in the chaos, I noticed the red box.

“Toni!” I shouted. “What else did you order out of your magazine?”

“Huh?” She was ducking and jumping, trying desperately to stay out of the monster’s reach.

The vanity table began to move across the bedroom floor. Wood and plaster cracked. We had only seconds.

“Tell me now!” I shouted, beating at the tentacle with a Happy Trails hairbrush.

Toni clambered onto her matching Pink Princess dresser to escape the flailing tail. It followed her, pulling out drawers. Socks and underpants flew.

“What’s in the box?” I screamed again.

From her perch, she said, “Um … uh … let me think.”

The door was ripped from its hinges.

“Um … a pair of X-ray glasses, a Hypno-Coin, onion gum, a crystal ball, a Captain Gizmo atomic ray gun, and—”

Lunging across the room, I snatched the package out from under a shredded Snuffy Town bedspread just as the door burst open. The monsters stood there, staring, smiling.…

I clawed at the package’s wrapping. Please, God, I begged, please don’t let it be the onion gum!

The monsters slithered across the floor, suction cups fluttering eagerly. We were trapped.

Toni jumped off the dresser. Placing herself between the monsters and me, she began hurling anything and everything at them—her poodle skirt, her
Howdy Doody
ventriloquist dummy, even her Elvis Presley records. “Go away! Get back!”

I pulled back the box flaps.

It wasn’t the onion gum!

“Get out of the way!” I shouted at Toni.

She turned, saw what I was holding and instantly
understood. She rolled to the left side as I raised the Captain Gizmo Atomic Ray Gun, aimed at the first monster and pulled the trigger. The ray gun crackled, flared red and let out a loud
dat-dat-dat-dat!

The first monster exploded in a cloud of black goop, splattering the Pink Princess wallpaper.

I pointed the gun at the second monster.

Dat-dat-dat-dat!

It exploded, too—a spewing fountain of black gore, teeth and suckers.

“We did it!” shouted Toni, hurling herself into my arms. “We did it!”

I dropped the ray gun and, whooping, whirled her around and around.

That’s when I felt something wet and rubbery twist around my ankle.

A tentacle rose from behind me and coiled around my legs. The slimy flesh tightened, squeezed, tugged. I could feel its rows of suckers tearing my skin. I turned and saw the thing. It was like the others—fork-tailed and tentacled—but its body was different … yellow … rounder … like … 
a huge rubber duck!
I had time for one thought—DO NOT ADD ANY INGREDIENTS BUT OFFICIAL INSTA-PETS PRODUCTS TO YOUR PETS’ WATER—before it grabbed me. I screamed, lightning bolts of pain radiating out to my fingertips and down to my toes. It had me, and I was being eaten alive.
Eaten alive!

Toni shrieked, hitting at the new monster with her bare fists.

“The ray gun!” I screamed.

She dropped to her knees, scrabbling through the debris of clothes and games and exploded stuffed animals.

The second tentacle whipped around my head, covering my mouth.

“Help me!” I tried to scream, but it came out a muffled moan.

The suckers were doing a vicious dance on my neck and face now, feasting on my skin, dissolving my flesh. The room began to grow dark. My breath came in weak puffs. I felt myself being lifted, tilted. I could smell the creature’s putrid breath, could hear—even through the hammering of my own heart—the gnashing and grinding of its teeth.

Dat-dat-dat-dat!

I dropped to the floor, splashing hard into a sticky pile of goo.

But I knew it was too late.

Toni dropped to her knees beside me. Although she was nothing more than a dark blur, I could hear her voice and feel the touch of her hand in mine. I could feel her tears dripping onto my ravaged face, too.

What was left of my mouth opened and closed like a dying goldfish. Strange, but I had always thought it would be a Russian A-bomb or a UFO that would get me
in the end. Who would ever have imagined a comic-book novelty?

“David, oh, David,” Toni sobbed.

I squeezed her hand weakly to reassure her. My sister was safe, and that was all that really mattered. I let my fingers relax.

“You must have cared deeply for your sister.” It was the girl in the long skirt. She was seated on an urn-shaped gravestone, and in the moonlight the tear slipping down her cheek glimmered like a tiny crystal.

David, his expression stricken, nodded.

“I had a sister, too,” the girl said. “Her name was Blanche. But I did not care for her.” She shook her head. “No, I did not care for her, not one little bit.… ”

A
FIERCE CHICAGO WIND ROARED off the lake that day, rattling the white buildings of the World’s Fair with rude, jostling whooshes. For one moment it settled—ah, calm at last, I thought—before puckishly rising again, more tempestuous than before.

I watched as fairgoers scampered along the winding pathways seeking refuge. According to the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, more than fourteen million visitors had already flocked here to experience the eye-catching wonders of the World’s Columbian Exposition—more commonly known as the Chicago World’s Fair. All across the country, Americans were mortgaging their farms and houses, borrowing money on their life insurance or trimming their Christmas budgets to save for the trip, convinced there would be nothing like it for at least another hundred years. And few, it seemed, regretted
their sacrifices. Just the other day I had read about an Iowa farmer who—after gazing openmouthed at Edison’s Tower of Light with its zigzagging, flashing bulbs—said to his wife, “Well, Susan, it paid, even if it did take all the burial money.”

Today’s weather, however, was wreaking havoc with the fairgoers’ fun. Some ducked into the immense Illinois Building to catch their breaths. Others sought protection in Machinery Hall or girded themselves against the blustery gusts with a stein of beer at the German Village. But the wind always found them. Shoving. Pushing. Snatching off hats and blowing up skirts.

Already this evening’s fireworks had been rescheduled, and the movable sidewalk that jutted into Lake Michigan was shut down because of the whitecaps breaking over it. I had even heard rumors that Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show would be canceled.

Such a shame! I would have sincerely loved seeing my sister, Blanche, get trampled by a herd of stampeding bison.

“I cannot believe this weather, and on the day
I
decide to attend the fair,” Blanche fretted, fumbling with her parasol. It might have been windy, but the sun beating down on us was a hot July one.

Just as soon as she opened her parasol, though, the wind snatched it from her lace-gloved hands. It flew out over the North Pond like a fleeing raven.

I giggled.

“I fail to see the humor,” said Blanche in her usual
nose-in-the-air tone. “I’ll be baked crispy as a farmhand if I don’t escape this dreadful sun.”

I imagined a curl of smoke rising from a charred, withered thing. Blanche baked to a crisp. Delightful!

Blanche noted my pleasure.

“Sister dear,” she said oh so sweetly, “you’re positively
dewy
.” She offered me one of her lace-edged handkerchiefs. It smelled of rose water. “Really, Evelyn, you sweat so profusely one might think you were a common laborer.” And with that bit of nastiness, she sailed off.

I stood there, hating her. I think I had always hated my twin sister—since that day, sixteen years ago last month, when we were born.

Blanche came first, of course, shoving me aside so she could make her dramatic entrance into the world. The firstborn. The special one.

“She had such wide blue eyes,” Mother once recalled when I asked about that day, “and such translucent alabaster skin. The midwife claimed she’d never seen such a beautiful infant.”

“What about me?” I begged. “What do you remember about me?”

“You were different from Blanche,” Mother said. “So small and dark. We were”—she fumbled for the word—“startled.”

Something cold and bitter began nibbling at my insides.

Did anyone coo over me when I appeared minutes later? I longed to ask. Did they marvel at my skin, too?
Admire my eyes? I guessed not. As always, Blanche had seized all the attention for herself.

As we grew, our differences became more pronounced. Blanche was all golden light. I was dingy and plump. Blanche glowed with wit and laughter. I preferred to keep to myself. Blanche was all cultured breeding. I detested putting on airs.

“Like day and night,” Father often said.

“More like Beauty and the Beast,” Blanche would taunt behind his back.

That was Blanche—sweet kisses and pretty smiles in public, hisses and torment when we were alone together.

Now Blanche turned, the wind snapping at her skirts. “Come
on
, Evelyn.” She pressed her
Handbook of the World’s Columbian Exposition
to her chest to keep its hundreds of pages from ruffling. “Honestly, you dodder like an old man. We won’t have time to see a thing if you don’t hurry up.”

What she meant was that we wouldn’t have time to see all the things
she
wanted to see. If I’d had my druthers, we’d have been walking along the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long stretch of the exotic and miraculous—Persian belly dancers, Hindu jugglers and, of course, Mr. Ferris’s big steel wheel. I heard there was even a wax museum where one could see Marie Antoinette about to be guillotined.